Media control as source of political power: The role of oligarchs in electoral authoritarian regimes

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In hybrid political regimes the manipulation of media reporting is one of the major battlegrounds for political power. In countries ranging from Venezuela over Russia to Turkey increasing authoritarian tendencies have started with pressure on independent media and their owners, who in many cases are powerful business people.The general assumption in the literature is that business tycoons in authoritarian regimes use their media assets to negotiate better deals with the incumbent elite in exchange for support of the government agenda by their media. However, this assumption is obviously challenged in situations when (1) the interests of the ruling political elites go against the interests of media-owning business tycoons or when (2) the legitimacy of the political regime is questioned by the people through mass protests. Moreover, it is regularly assumed that media ownership gives direct control over media reporting, implying that ownership leads to the desired message being efficiently produced by the media. Within the proposed research project we will test this assumption by examining the media and journalists as agents rather than mouthpieces of the owners. We will also study the strategic narrative used by business elites in order to get a better understanding of the impact of their media control not just on narrow political power struggles, but also on the broader framing of political events and on the political regime.None of the authors claiming the political relevance of media ownership by business tycoons has so far made the indeed demanding effort to systematically assess the actual impact of ownership on media reporting, and most importantly, changes in the framing of events, when the interests of business tycoons collide with those of the political elite, forcing the business tycoons to adjust their strategies. The proposed research project will systematically and thoroughly analyse the instrumentalization of mass media by business tycoons during contentious moments and the effects of that instrumentalization on the political regime. To this aim the project will employ a multi-method approach focusing most prominently on content analysis and interviews in a comparative case studies design. Due to the relatively large number of electoral authoritarian regimes with media-owning business tycoons, the post-Soviet region (with Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine as case countries) has been selected in a most similar cases-design.